Creating spaces for radical pedagogy in higher education

Abstract

This paper tells stories from a higher education study abroad collaboration entitled Investigating Diversity, Human Rights and Civil Society in Japan and Australia. Starting from a pedagogical focus on students’ active learning about human rights, this project has come to value relationship building—between academic institutions, civil society and community groups, and individuals. We ask ‘what is human rights education?’, and argue for a radical pedagogy in which knowledge about human rights and diversity is negotiated in ‘third spaces’ (Bhabha). In an attempt to address the ‘im/possibility of engaging with alterity outside of a pedagogic relationship of appropriation or domination’ (Sharma), learners ‘become border crossers in order to understand otherness on its own terms’ (Giroux). As the stories demonstrate, active learning also requires active unlearning (Spivak). Pivotal to our radical pedagogy is a conception of human rights education as dialogic and that creates the conditions for ethical encounters with otherness.

Human rights and nutritional care in nurse education: lessons learned

“…HRE has been criticized for being a way to point the finger towards others for violating human rights without critical self-reflecting on their own context. 54 A recent doctoral thesis 55 argues that HRE is built around dichotomizations, and Norway is often presented in contrast ‘to foreign countries’ where human rights violations occur. Rights violations are thus seen as a problem outside rather than within Norway’s borders; this may make students’ own context feel less relevant even though, as noted earlier, nursing students and health professionals meet ethical challenges and rights violations on a daily basis.…”

Critical Digital Pedagogy in Higher Education

“…CP argues that the role of the educator is to awaken learners out of this torpor by making them conscious of how traditional education is oppressing them. CP then focuses on supporting learners' search for voice and their eventual efforts at emancipation from oppressive practices (Blanchard & Nix, 2019;. In practice, this might, for example, encourage racialized students to challenge the hegemonic whiteness of academia (Vidal-Ortiz, 2017), Global South and Indigenous students to seek the decolonization of the curriculum and assessment practices (Malik, 2017), or LGBTQ2S+ students to query the heteronormativity of disciplines (Boustani & Taylor, 2020).…”

Reducing inequalities among species through an arts-based inquiry in early childhood teacher education

“…How the students experienced and acted upon non-human others, as well as how they represented, acknowledged, and respected them, is closely related to potentials for reduction of inequalities between all beings. We might speak of radical ethics, parallel to how Blanchard and Nix (2019) address "radical pedagogy": when students are challenged to identify ethical questions regarding 'marginalized others.´ Being able to identify marginalized others and to start treating them more ethically, depends on teachers abilities to "create possibilities for students to connect more ethically with 'otherness' when investigating diversity, human rights and civil society-as the research encounter is highly contextual and continually in negotiation" (Blanchard and Nix, 2019, p. 67). In our context, the marginalized others were ants, horses, trees, water, and clay.…”